_Often, there's never a cause of miscarriage a woman is told about when something unhappy like this happens. It's just a puzzle that they live with, forever.

Why should they have suffered a miscarriage when they seemed to take all the advice that was given to them and lived right?

Sometimes, as it turns out, there could be things that no one ever told them about, and no one ever suspected.

For instance, a study published in the prestigious Canadian Medical Association Journal recently, has pointed at a very common painkiller – ibuprofen. It could be something that could cause miscarriages when taken early in the first few weeks of a pregnancy.

Ibuprofen as a cause of miscarriage? What other horrible dangers lurk in the things we easily do everyday without a second thought? It isn't just ibuprofen either – all kinds of NSAIDs can do this, apparently, if a woman takes them in the first 20 weeks.

What is a pregnant woman to do if she has to take painkillers for some kind of serious condition? Well, that is certainly a problem.

She will probably need to talk to her doctor to see if there is an alternative he can think of. Not that this is an uncommon problem, either – one in five pregnant women take ibuprofen or naproxen over-the-counter or with a prescription.

The disturbing thing about this study though is that its findings are entirely circumstantial. The researchers responsible for the study haven't really established why ibuprofen should harm a pregnancy.

They have just managed to find that when you study thousands of pregnant women who have suffered a miscarriage, you find that a large number of them are usually ibuprofen users.

Could there be something else that these women have in common that could have caused the miscarriage?

They readily accept that there could be something else that could explain why all these women had miscarriages – heart disease, depression, high blood pressure among diabetes – practically anything.

But as far as researchers know, it is ibuprofen; and they seem to be working with the idea that ibuprofen could make a miscarriage twice as likely.

The researchers have a theory for why ibuprofen could be responsible. These drugs are known to affect hormone levels in our bodies. In particular, they effect prostaglandins, which the body keeps under tight control, normally, during pregnancy.

Now, doctors aren't completely sure about what to do with this information, since nothing's been proven yet. But women could remain careful as a matter of personal choice.